Imbalance – Heatmap Graph

One of the comparisons I want to make in my booklet is between low voter turnout areas and Conservative wins, if turnout was higher then there's the potential for the Conservatives to have lost, i.e. your vote does make a difference, or at least it can. Below is the process I went through to create this custom graph from 2 Guardian maps displaying turnout and Tory wins.

The two graphs:

Placed atop each other for comparison later:

Palette colours chosen for the new 'hot' colours:

Using Illustrators 're-colour artwork' feature I can apply my new palette to the map:

This is how the map looked after the switch:

The same colours are chosen for the turnout map:

However this time I am reversing the colours round, darker = less people voted and lighter = more people voted. This will bring the areas with low voter turnout and tory share of the vote to the darkest shades:

How the map looks:

I then blended the 2 maps together to give one reading from both, the darker the area, the lower the voter turnout in a conservative strong area – the more people who begin to vote, the lesser strangle any party will have on that outcome:

I added spots to serve as rough consistuency markers:

The final graph: